Verifying hardware in its software context

Abstract

We describe a method for verifying hardware whose correct behaviour depends upon its software interface. It is presumed that the hardware is presented as a synchronous RTL model whereas the software is presented as an asynchronous abstraction. Our methodology incorporates partial order reduction on the software side, and localization reduction, to deal with the computational complexity of the verification. The partial order reduction is implemented as a constraint on the transition relation of a synchronous transformation of the software model. The reduced transformed model then may be verified using a verification algorithm whose scope is purely synchronous models, without modification. Thus, independent of the interface verification problem, this gives a general method for combining partial order reduction with symbolic model checking.